The history of morals, like that of politics, follows the swing of the pendulum, and some reaction on the part of each generation from the habits of its fathers seems to be inevitable. In so reacting it reverts to those of its fathers’ fathers. Thus each generation tends to take the gods of its grandfathers from the shelf upon which its fathers have placed them.
To-day we are at the beginning of a period of reaction from the license of the War. The difference between young people of between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and their predecessors of seven years ago is very marked. The latter were casual, offhand, and easy-going. They observed little ceremonial in their relationships with each other, smoked, flirted and made love when and where they pleased, married in haste and repented at leisure or dispensed with marriage altogether, and despised rather than revered the aged to whom they were a constant source of horror and amazement. What is perhaps most noticeable about their successors to-day is their improvement in manners. They are chivalrous to women, considerate to the old, maintain a decorum at dances which is positively Victorian, and instead of hastening to establish sexual relations with whomsoever attracts them, have actually gone out of their way to postpone the fruition of their desires by a reintroduction of the rite known as “engagement”.
In particular, women, no longer treated as the equals of men, are alternatively worshipped and disregarded, blown aloft like soap bubbles or jettisoned as lumber. The reaction, in short, is already well under weigh, and its influence for many years to come will be great.
But the normal cycle of action and reaction, of licentious eighteenth and Puritanical nineteenth centuries, depends for its recurrence on the entrance of no new factors; it is bound up that is to say with the property status of women and the production of children as the fruit of sexual intercourse. Once new factors are introduced, it may well be thrown permanently out of gear. Birth control and the economic independence of women are to my mind factors of this kind. The changes they portend are incalculable, and, though their full effects may be delayed for two or three decades, no Puritan revival nor any number of such revivals, whether backed by the law or finding expression in public opinion merely, will in the long run be able to stand against them.
I am conscious that what I have written in this book will seem to many to be cynical and disruptive. I shall be charged with taking a low view of human nature, and speaking slightingly of morality. My answer is, first, that what I have written of in these pages is not human nature as a whole, but that part of human nature only which expresses itself in what is called morality; and secondly, that what is called morality is not in any true sense of the word morality at all. Morality, as I understand it, is positive: it insists that certain things are good and ought to be pursued even if the heavens fall. But the habits of thought and standards of conduct I have analyzed in this book, although they are called morality, are not positive but negative. Their appeal is to men’s fears rather than to their hopes; they tell them not what they must do to be saved, but what they must not do if they are to avoid the censure of society. Their basis is the instinct to possess, and their weapon the power to blame. Men blame those who claim a liberty they dare not assert for themselves, and dignify with the name of morality the indulgence of possessive instincts in which savages glory without hypocrisy. “What could I have done in the circumstances?” asked the husband of an erring wife in a recent society scandal case. “If you ask me to tell you I will. You could have told your wife that if she went with the man again, you would get her divorced. You could then have gone up to London and assaulted Sir X Y, and to hell with your career”, replied the eminent counsel on the other side.
This is the law of the jungle; it is the expression of most of what passes for morality to-day, and, while it prevails, there is little hope for the world. Of positive morality which brings the conviction that some things are good and ought to be pursued for their own sake, there has never been less. It is doubtful indeed whether a positive morality can exist without a strong and lively religious feeling, and religion was never at so low an ebb.
The emotional enthusiasm which religion generates is indispensable to a true morality. For good or for evil religion is the looser of great forces. It may be captured and made to serve base ends, but under the influence of the emotion which it creates men can be brought to believe that some things are better than others, and to overcome any obstacle in order that the good things may prevail. It is this belief which is lacking in the world to-day.
Until, then, the life-force can contrive again to send a great religious teacher into the world, a true, positive morality will be lacking. The man who is born in England will continue to believe that it is right to marry one wife, and the man who is born in Persia will continue to believe that it is right to marry four, and each will invoke morality to justify his belief. Such morality is merely topographical; it reflects no conception of what is good, and it gives us no hope that the world can be made better because it does not believe that its own world is bad.
Meanwhile the less we write and think about morality the better. A world without religion is a sad and a tiring world because it lacks an object, and for this reason there have been few generations which have known less happiness than our own. In such a world those who think the least have the best of it. In such a world reflection can only produce despondency, and it is better to take our professions and prejudices ready made from the social shop, than to embark on a sea of troubles by thinking out a morality for ourselves, to act with the business man rather than to brood with the philosophers.